DEAD GONE a gripping crime thriller full of twists

by T. J. Brearton

  “What was the outcome of the lawsuit?”

  “Ward lost. The court found that there were no grounds for what he was asking — money to recompense his loss of income.”

  It was taking shape. Ward had an axe to grind. But how it related to Carrie’s death was unclear.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Tom said, “Ward worked for the tox lab. Determining drugs in a body, things like that. How did the low copy number DNA come into play?”

  Albrecht shifted, crossing his legs. He seemed to be growing more comfortable with Tom now that they’d veered from Ward’s personal profile.

  “Well, the lab is just one part of the Medical Examiner’s Office. That office performs about twenty-five hundred autopsies each year, sees lots of cases. They developed novel techniques and procedures for analyzing trace quantities of DNA left on touched objects. There was a case Ward was involved in, several bodies turned up after a drug deal gone bad. Police recovered a handgun at the scene, believed to have been passed among several people. The office felt it could reliably discern DNA profiles from such a sample.”

  “They used the low copy number technique.”

  “Correct. That’s when Ward balked. He was doing the tox screens on the bodies. He became very vocal that the LCN results should not be introduced in the courtroom.”

  “Why? Based on some moral principle?”

  “Sure. It’s possible he was worried it could lead to wrongful convictions, an erosion of criminal justice, et cetera. But, I don’t think Ward’s any kind of human rights crusader, he just believes in his way of doing things.”

  “I’ve encountered that.”

  “He’s in it for himself. I mean . . . who isn’t, to some degree. But Ward . . . Put it this way, Ward didn’t like one of the cops who was working the case. They’d come to loggerheads before and this cop was really pushing for a conviction through the low copy number data. I know, because Ward was talking to me while this was going on.”

  “Who was the cop?”

  Albrecht took another pull on his cigar, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. When the smoke cleared, he stared across the table at Tom.

  “Her name was Lauren Blythe. Do you know her?”

  * * *

  Tom sped along in the Jeep toward the County Courthouse. He’d continued to grill Albrecht, getting earfuls of forensic jargon, but essentially it kept coming back to the same thing: low copy number typing was controversial. Cops and prosecutors loved it, because it added more to their arsenal taking down the bad guys. Sometimes all there was for evidence were a few microscopic scraps. With LCN, those scraps could mean putting a criminal behind bars.

  But not everyone was aboard. Ward may have been against the technique on principle, but he’d seemed to dig in his heels for more personal reasons.

  Blythe . . .

  She’d been working this case that Ward was a part of. The two of them had gone head to head over whether or not to use LCN to aid in the prosecution of a big case.

  Then, Ward had resigned. He’d been ostracized, Albrecht said, his pushback against LCN profiling construed as helping criminals. They’d said Ward had “gone Indian,” “gone native,” empathizing with the bad guys.

  Blythe had a history with Ward she’d never mentioned. And now here he was, chief medical examiner in Everglades County, and he was the pathologist on the Carrie Hobson murder case. It seemed like a huge conflict of interest. And Tom had felt unsettled about how and why the FDLE had gotten involved. Maybe Blythe had spoken to Turnbull. Maybe they knew Ward would be handling the death investigation and Blythe wanted to keep an eye on him.

  Tom glanced at his phone sitting on the passenger seat, rattling around with the vehicle’s vibrations. He should call Blythe right now.

  But, how could he trust her? And what would he say? That she’d lied to him, withheld critical information? That he thought Ward was — what? Involved in Carrie’s death?

  Instead, he picked up the phone and called Veronica Morley at the crime lab. Morley wasn’t there, so Tom asked the tech who had answered the phone to grab the files on Carrie.

  “You’re using low copy number DNA typing on the Carrie Hobson case. Blood found on her shirt. Right?”

  Tom was close to shouting and the tech seemed flustered.

  “Correct, Agent Lange. What can—?”

  Tom lowered his volume. “Anybody call you? Anyone from Everglades County hounding you for results? Vice narcotics, maybe?”

  “Um, no, no one called me. I’ll check the log, see if Veronica—”

  “Tell me how you worked it.”

  “I’m sorry? Tell you how—”

  “You make millions of copies of the sample’s telltale DNA regions. Then you look for a match, right?”

  “Well, we focus on Short Tandem Repeats, which vary widely from person to person. But essentially, yes, we look for a match.”

  Tom remembered his schooling — to convict a suspect, his or her STR repeats must match all thirteen STR regions in the crime scene sample.

  “So where did you get your suspect samples from?” he asked. “Are you using CODIS?”

  The tech seemed confused. “No, sir. We’re testing a single sample right now.”

  Tom felt a lump in his throat. “And where did you get it from?”

  “From Agent Blythe, sir.”

  “Name?” Tom asked. A car blared its horn as he swerved into the next lane and made a turn at the traffic light.

  “The name is Raymond T. Bosco.”

  I fucking knew it, Tom thought.

  “And how many STR sites match so far?”

  “Right now we have eleven out of thirteen.”

  Tom put it all together. When all thirteen STR sites matched perfectly, it was virtually guaranteed you’d gotten your culprit — the odds of fingering the wrong person were about one in a billion. A single STR mismatch, however, was enough to exonerate a suspect, and the LCN typing was what made the whole thing dicey.

  “Thank you.” Tom hung up.

  He reached the County Courthouse, grabbed a spot and jogged across the parking lot. Many cops would be wrapped up in the new Sasha Clay case, but Machado hadn’t been at the crime scene. He didn’t want to be seen in the main building so he called Machado and had her meet him at the field office. He told her to bring the list of volunteers from the Reserve.

  She showed up at the office ten minutes later. Tom had the lights off and was sitting in the gloom.

  Machado came in, looking around, a worried expression on her face. “What’s going on?”

  He grabbed the file from her and flopped it down on the desk. The volunteers had been alphabetized and he flipped through the pages until he came to the letter W.

  Tom stared down at the thumbnail picture of Dr. Alan Ward.

  Machado was nervous. “Lange? You’re freaking me out a little bit.”

  Tom pointed at Ward’s image, reading the caption beside it. “Ward volunteered for two months, two years ago. On the mangrove restoration project.”

  “Yeah? And? There’s hundreds of volunteers. I think we counted at least thirty who are active medical professionals, law enforcement, or retired . . .”

  Tom looked at her. “What did Ward have to say about it?”

  She seemed to shrink from his intense gaze. “What did he say? He didn’t say anything, because we didn’t ask him about it.”

  Tom thought about it, and registered the look in Machado’s eyes. She was clocking him like he had gone nuts. And, maybe he had. Tom sat down heavily in the desk chair. His eyes were drawn back to the picture of Ward. Then he turned away as Machado settled into Blythe’s chair at the other desk.

  “Lange, what’s going on?”

  He didn’t know if he should say anything. He was under IAB review, for one thing. For another, the ideas forming were just an inchoate swirl. Anecdotal, still nothing solid.

  “Hang on a minute,” he said. “Can you just stay here for a few minutes?”


  “Sure . . .” She reminded him of those child-protection workers years ago. Looking at him like they felt sorry for him.

  Tom picked up the phone on the desk and called up to Tampa. He asked for Detective Gomez.

  “Lange, what do you want?”

  “Did you hear back on the vehicle check?”

  “No, not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “How about Jimmy Kendall? The other bouncer? I asked you to get a sketch artist to him.”

  Gomez was silent.

  “Pick him up for me. Get him with an artist. We need the driver of that Lexus. We need the sketch, we need the reg. And we need it now.”

  Tom hung up before Gomez could be cute and say anything else. Then Tom looked over at Machado, who raised her eyebrows. “Boy, you’re hot, huh?”

  He needed to trust someone, he needed help. Blythe hadn’t been upfront with him, Gomez was a narc. “Ward had some kind of falling out with the District Medical Examiner’s Office in Tampa a few years back. Did you know about it?”

  She shook her head.

  “I talked to a former mentor of Ward’s, from where he did his fellowship, a guy named David Albrecht.”

  “Sure, I know Albrecht. He wrote the book on forensic chemistry. He was on one of those shows . . . oh, what was it? One of those cop shows.”

  “Albrecht said Ward had no friends, never a girlfriend. I think Ward might’ve had some sexual issues. And he worked in Tampa until this case. There were multiple vics in a drug deal gone bad. A highway chase, car crashes. Ward was working the toxicology for Traffic Homicide Investigations. And Blythe was involved.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “When you and I first met, you said you thought Blythe had been with the Drug Interdiction Team. You were right. I checked and she was definitely on that case. The whole thing hinged on DNA obtained from the car wrecks. The cops closed their case but Ward raised a racket. I think he fouled the case for the prosecution somehow. Ward claimed they forced him to resign and he filed a lawsuit. He lost.”

  Tom could see Machado putting it together. She searched the gloom for a moment. “You think Ward is involved in the Carrie Hobson murder? Last I checked your crime lab was closing in on matching DNA from trace evidence to Raymond T. Bosco.”

  “I know,” Tom said. “I know . . .”

  Machado narrowed her eyes. “So, what’ve you got? You got Carrie Hobson mixed up in a drug operation — wittingly or unwittingly — and you’ve got Bosco likely your killer. Sasha Clay talks to you the other night, she winds up dead, too. Ward is just the pathologist. So what if he’s got a past? We’ve all got a past.”

  “Yeah, but who’s the guy talking to Carrie Hobson on the tape from the used car lot? Who’s the guy following her home in the white Lexus?”

  Machado blinked. “You lost me.”

  Tom opened his laptop and plugged in the flash drive where he’d copied the Gleason’s car lot footage.

  Machado stood up. “I gotta get back, Lange.”

  He opened up the video file and beckoned Machado closer. She acted like he was contagious, keeping her distance.

  “I’m not gonna bite.”

  She relaxed a little and stood over his shoulder, watching as the video played.

  “This is from what? The Gleason’s car dealership?”

  “Right.”

  They fell silent as the scene played out. They watched Carrie exit the side door and then someone after her leaned out. “There,” Tom said. “Does that look like a bandage on that guy’s hand?”

  “Pretty hard to tell. I can’t even make out his face.”

  “Bosco had some stitches removed the other day. He cut himself slicing fruit at the bar. I see a big bandage there on his hand. That guy is Bosco, I know it. Alright, here comes the second guy. Look, see how he moves? Does that remind you of anyone?”

  Machado leaned down now, at last intrigued, her apprehension dissolved. He could smell her perfume and felt her hair brush his ear. It remind him of Sasha Clay.

  “Yeah,” Machado said. “Huh.”

  “Huh what?”

  Machado stood up and said nothing else until the video ended. Tom was tempted to show her the warehouse video with the street view, but he sensed Machado getting edgy again. He spun around in his chair and looked up at her.

  “What do you think?”

  She was pale. “I don’t know what I think. What did Blythe say?”

  “Nothing. This video wouldn’t hold up in any court. You could only make an ID on someone at a closer range.”

  “Any way to enhance it? Don’t you have people for that?”

  “You just watched the enhanced version. There’s one where the video is cropped, but they’re just bigger pixels. You can’t add resolution.”

  Machado absently rubbed a finger on her lips, staring at the last frame of video on the screen. She didn’t have to say it, but Tom knew she thought the person on the screen could be Ward. It was subtle, it was in the gait, the posture, but it was there.

  “I gotta go, Lange.” She headed for the door.

  “Machado,” he called before she walked out. “Can you do me a favor? Just keep this between us for now.”

  She hesitated in the doorway, looked down and nodded. “I can do that.” Then she left.

  * * *

  He called Gomez again.

  “Were you on the case a few years back, multiple collisions after chasing down possible drug traffickers?”

  “What? What case? You better quit it, Lange. This thing will turn around and bite you.” Normally Gomez was a bit smug. Now he sounded cold. “Listen, guy, Blythe called. She said you’re off the case and we’re not supposed to consult with you on it anymore.”

  “I’ll call the DMV myself.”

  “The DMV is no longer running the offline search. It’s dead.” Gomez hung up.

  Tom stood up and grabbed his files and his jacket. He headed out the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Tom slipped into the County Courthouse feeling like a fugitive. When the prosecutor’s clerk asked him what he was doing, he told her he was following up on an order of protection for Alicia Strong. It had been days since he’d spoken with or seen Alicia, but he doubted she’d changed her mind.

  She hadn’t. There was no record of Alicia getting the injunction against McDermott, nor had she pressed any charges. His heart sank.

  But he had another purpose in the courthouse. He spent the next hour drawing up a subpoena for the company which owned the ATM located next to Hush. Gomez was supposed to have done it, but now Tom doubted it. Once he’d submitted the paperwork he hurried away, taking the stairway down to the ground level. He jumped into the Jeep and headed straight for Tin City.

  * * *

  It was just after 5 p.m. as Tom pulled in. Naples Police were still on scene — two cops tidied up the sawhorses and spooled crime scene tape, the road block gone. Crime scene techs crawled over the rocks and Tom edged closer to the spot beneath the bridge. He recognized Katie Mills. When she saw him she raised her gloved hand in a tentative wave.

  The body was gone. By now Sasha Clay would be in Dr. Ward’s hands. Literally. He would be touching her, prodding her, examining her wounds. Tom knew the head wound itself wasn’t enough to link the two victims, but they were connected in so many other ways — both strippers at Hush, both associates of Bosco, both found in Naples though they lived and worked in Tampa. The fact that they’d each succumbed to blunt force trauma (whether Ward, Mr. Meticulous, felt comfortable making that call or not) was just icing on the cake.

  It was like the killer was mocking the police. Saying, Look what I can do. I can take two lives, right in the same way, and still leave you scrambling.

  If anything it only emboldened the cops against Bosco. They knew Tom had talked to Sasha at Kronos. They would say Bosco knew it, too, and killed her. Blythe and the others were tightening around Bosco like boa constrictors.

  Tom stared at the scene (the Naple
s cops were watching him now, drawing closer), then turned and headed into the mini-mall to see his brother.

  Nick was just packing up for the day. He suddenly struck Tom as so professional, the way he placed his papers neatly in the briefcase, lost in thought.

  Tom knocked on the open door and roused Nick.

  “Oh, hey bro.”

  Tom glanced at the paintings on the wall. “Hey. You have any of your art stuff with you? Charcoals, paper, whatever you use?”

  Nick raised an eyebrow in sarcasm. “You want me to do your portrait?”

  “I need a favor from you. I’m calling on my marker.”

  “So soon?” Nick snapped his briefcase closed.

  “Yep. Time to cash it in. But rest assured, it involves a strip club.”

  “Tell me more.”

  Tom told Nick about the call from Turnbull, and his pending suspension.

  “So this is, like, some private detective shit,” Nick said.

  “You’re going to do a sketch for me. Based on a description. Think you can do that?”

  Nick considered it. “I’m rusty. Haven’t drawn or painted for a while . . .”

  “It’ll be fine,” Tom said. He didn’t tell Nick about Ward. He didn’t want Nick to think about Ward, or know what he looked like. It needed to be an uncontaminated effort. They headed for the parking lot and Tom suggested they take the Jeep. But Nick was parked at the marina and he didn’t have a pass to park it overnight.

  Tom sat in the Jeep looking out at the boats while Nick got into the rental. Sailboats and yachts and a few smaller fishing boats bobbed in Naples Bay. There was a tourist ferry chugging along in the near distance. One of these days he was going to have to get out on the water. Get his own boat. Maybe even live on it.

  He followed Nick to his home in Port Royal and on the way got an unexpected call.

  Blythe was curt, emotionally detached. “Thought you should hear it from me first. We’re going to arrest and charge Raymond T. Bosco with the murder of Carrie Hobson.”